Press review Dec. 3

It has emerged that 13 year old Sara, who died on Sunday from carbon monoxide poisoning from a homemade brazier used for heating, had been doing her homework by candlelight for the past two and a half months that PPC (the electricity company) had cut the family’s electricity.

Read the orginal story here.

–          Issue could potentially short-circuit government which is trying to avoid an ‘accident’
–          Initiative from Kaklamanis with proposal to postpone moratorium for two years
–          Disagreements over criteria for the ‘haves’
 
Antonis Samaras and Evangelos Venizelos [Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister respectively] are putting on a play called «Resisting the Troika» with the main subject being auctions of foreclosed homes, an issue that affects hundreds of thousands of home-owners.
Under pressure from their parties’ MPs, the prime minister took on the role of ‘strong silent type’ with the deputy prime minister adopting the role of ‘the shouter,’ drawing supposedly red lines.
Following their meeting yesterday in Maximou, they announced legislation to be passed by the end of the year –even without the troika’s agreement – with, until now, vague criteria [for assessing the means of home-owners whose homes have been foreclosed on.]

BACKGROUND
In Greece there is a ban on banks auctioning homes that have been foreclosed when those are main residences. Greece’s troika of lenders (the IMF, ECB and EC) are pressing for the ban to be lifted before agreeing to Greece’s 2014 budget and releasing the next tranche of loans to Greece.
However the government is reluctant to make such a move saying that the flood of houses being put up for auction would cause the housing market to crash and cause an explosion in Greece’s homeless population. Furthermore many coalition MPs are threatening to vote against legislation to lift the ban thus potentially triggering wider political consequences for an increasingly shaky governement.
The troika has responded that the ban is being abused by people who have the money to pay their mortgages but choose not to, and that it is the government’s job to keep people in shelter, not the banks’.

– In addition to the destruction of the middle class the people behind the memorandum target average working age.
– Discussions over expanding partial employment to include even businesses that will make use of the new legal framework allowingfor mass layoffs. Moves towards mass replacement of older ‘expensive’ workers by young workers without rights.
The complete restructuring of the labour market with the elimination of employment rights that were built up over decades and the drastic cheapening of the cost of labour, are what the government and the troika are arranging under the pretense of ensuring the ‘survival’ of business struggling – due to the crisis. The government is maintaining that the troika is ‘suddenly’ linking the issue of allowing mass layoffs in the private sector and state-run companies (DEKO) with the lifting of restrictions on part-time work – both those restrictions governing the proportion of part-time work allowed and those affecting the renewal of contracts. 
In other words it wants to expand and make permament these changes even in those companies that will have proceeded with mass layoffs. Such a move would create a powerful incentive to replace older workers with many hard won rights with younger workers with none.

The deposits of natural gas in the Cypriot gas field known as ‘Aphrodite’ are smaller than initial estimates, as has been confirmed by a report released by the Israeli drilling companies Delek Drilling and Avner Oil, which calculates the maximum volume of natural gas present at 4.1 trillion cubic feet. This amount renders unviable plans to construct a natural gas liquification facility in Vasiliko which to be economically sustainable would require a natural gas field with a volume of at least 5.6 trillion cubic feet. This means that the fate of the natural gas terminal now depends on the route Israel chooses for the distribution of its own natural gas to European markets.